


commiser8

by Elendraug



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Animal Death, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Missing Scene, Neglect, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: Try to make sense of this mess yourself.





	commiser8

**Author's Note:**

> I've never seriously written John or Vriska until now
> 
> couldn't really decide between commiser8, exacerb8, and ingr8ti8, but commiserate seemed the most accur8

GT: anyway, this thing is kind of a death trap, and i haven't ridden it for years.  
GT: i think my dad had it installed as one of his ridiculous ways of making a man out of me.  
AG: Sure.  
AG: My custodian had her ways of making me tougher too.  
GT: yeah.  
GT: parents, right? haha.  
GT: anyway, that's my back yard. pretty damn boring, sorry.  
GT: i would show you inside, but i don't think my dad would take too kindly to bringing an alien inside.  
GT: or, just yet. i would need to brace him for it.  
AG: That's fine.  
AG: What else can you show me?

* * *

“So earlier this year, there was this time that my dad was driving us back from somewhere, maybe from seeing a movie? Yeah, it was _10,000 BC_, which was pretty good! And we were driving back on the highway, and I was in the passenger seat because obviously _I_ can’t drive, and I saw this spider was making a spider web in the side view mirror.”

Vriska sits on the parabola of the swing’s seat, and grips the chill metal of the dual chains that support her weight as she sways. Despite brushing it off, the lingering remnants of snow soak into the fabric of her jeans; even her body temperature is enough to melt it, eventually. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, so, it was stretching its home out between the mirror and the side of the car, and we were going really fast!” John continues the story while standing between the candy-striped legs of the swingset frame, staring at her yellow claws as she clutches the chains for balance. “And I thought, oh no, what if it can’t hold on because the wind is too strong?”

She glances to him with her imperceptible peripheral vision, as white as the yard, as blank as the precipitous sky. “I thought you thought spiders were gross.”

“I haven’t even gotten to the gross part yet.” He grips the twin poles of the frame, but they’re not sturdy enough to allow him to lift himself so easily; not anymore, and not with the wetness of winter on their surface. “So I looked away for like, a split second, and when I looked out the window again the spider was gone.”

There’s a beat, and neither of them is breathing, but not because of the recounted narrative. “And?”

“And I didn’t know what happened to it! I looked for it when we got back home but didn’t see anything. I don’t know about what happens to spiders when they fall from heights or stuff like that. I feel like I’ve heard that it’s different for bugs because of how they don’t really have bones, y’know?” He shrugs, still with his fingers wrapped around the metal. “And it’s not like they can fly, really.”

Vriska looks at down at her shoes, at the canvas sodden with snow, and toes at the ground. The swing rocks. “Dumb place for a spider to build her home, if you ask me.”

“Exactly, but even though we can see that it’s not safe to set up shop there, because we can see the full picture, it’s not like it had any idea, right? I mean, who would intentionally pick a dangerous location to live in? It’s just asking for trouble.”

She kicks off from the ground, harder this time, supplying her own momentum with no one to give her a push. “Nobody would do that.”

“Duh.” John follows the breeze as it brushes her hair back over her shoulders, over the jacket he’s let her borrow. “So anyway, the next part is the gross part. The next day we went to get some more baking supplies, because my dad is constantly baking and running out of stuff, and the spider must’ve wanted to come with us.”

She picks up speed, and keeps her gaze fixed on the surrounding human hives of this alien set of streets. “Along for the ride, huh?” 

“Wouldn’t it be crazy if a spider had hobbies like that? What would it do, have a bake sale?” He laughs and dismisses the thought before she can respond. “So we were trying to make sure that my dad parked right, and I opened the door to see if he was inside the parking space lines, and he was, so I slammed the door shut and then unbuckled my seat belt while he turned the car off. When I opened the door again is when I saw it.”

After a few seconds she suspects he’s allowing dramatic tension to build, and prompts him, without looking at him. She tugs at the chains when it’s necessary and propels herself as a one-person pendulum, suspended, cheating gravity. “What’d you see?”

“When I slammed the door I squashed the spider and didn’t even realize it! It was crawling along the side of the car and its goopy guts were leaking out and smearing everywhere. It was so nasty.” He stops and sticks out his tongue and makes a noise of disgust. “It was like if you stomped on a water balloon but it wasn’t full of water and it was full of something slimy that took a while to leak out. Maybe it was blood? It didn’t seem like it was blood, but I don’t know a lot about bug blood anyway.”

“It was dying.” The rusting metal of the swingset creaks in its own imitation of a _tick, tock_ as she sustains her half-circuit. “Did you kill it?”

John’s face falls, and Vriska checks his expression each time she passes the vertex, each time she almost returns to the planet’s foreign surface. “Yeah. I did. I couldn’t… I couldn’t just leave it there like that, you know? That seemed really mean to do to somebody, to just let them bleed out and have to crawl around in a hell of a lot of pain until it got to be too much. I couldn’t do that, even to a spider.”

Vriska says nothing.

“So I found an old receipt from fast food or something like that, that we didn’t need, and I picked it up and crumpled it up into it and put it on the ground and pressed my foot on it until it had to be dead. I didn’t look, though. Then I threw it away when we walked into the store, and I felt bad, but where else was I supposed to put it besides the trash?” 

She allows her movement to dissipate: a clock in need of winding, or wanting for batteries. There was no way to achieve escape velocity, anyway. Not at this shallow rate.

“Sometimes we hurt people without meaning to, but we’ve still hurt them.” Her soles catch the frozen grass, and skid through mud and crushed chlorophyll until she stops. She looks at him, but there’s nothing in her eye sockets for him to meet. “It’s still dead because of you. All you did was solve a problem you created.”

John looks at his hand, off to the left, then stares back to center, to look at her as he poses the question. “Do you think it was the same spider?”

Vriska shrugs too, and the chains move slightly to mirror her. “You’ll never know now.”

“Its web was still on the car door. It’s fucked up if it survives being blown off the web on the inter state and then gets crushed when we’re going to buy some powdered sugar.” He frowns. “If it’d just stayed where it was supposed to be, then maybe that wouldn’t’ve happened.”

There’s green smeared onto the toes of her shoes now, and if she wasn’t a ghost, it’d be permanent. “But you just said that her web wasn’t safe, the way she built it. So what was the point of staying in her hive if it wasn’t safe to begin with?”

“I guess you’re right.” He sighs, and lets his left hand fall, so that he’s holding onto the structure with only his one hand. It’s cold, except where the metal has warmed slightly to his touch over time. “What was it even trying to do there, catch a ride? Catch the wind?”

Vriska looks at his shirt, where the logo matches the pogo ride. “You can’t catch wind in a web, John.”

“It’s probably more accurate to say that the wind caught the web, huh?” He leans his head against the pole, and it’s a matter of time before his hair freezes to it, but it’s possible that time has ceased to matter. “Anyway, the only thing worse than spiders is snakes.”

Vriska whirls on him, then, in a delayed response to the earlier harsh commentary. “Have you ever met any?!”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so? Not that I remember.” John tilts his skull, and it’s obvious that the position of his neck is uncomfortable, but he maintains it anyway. It’s easy to chalk up to a certain amount of stubbornness. “I was gonna say, though, that it’s probably because of the fact that human folk lore likes to blame our species’ departure from blissful ignorance on the cunning and trickery of a devil who showed up as a snake. Then we got forbidden knowledge or such.”

“So let me get this straight.” She lifts her hands up, finally releasing the chains that’d held her in place; the tire swing out front would’ve been a far worse selection, incapable of stabilizing anything, and a noose of sorts in its own right. Her abdomen feels punctured, tense in her solar plexus, anger spilling over like so much cerulean on Terezi’s sunken blade. “You’re all mad that somebody told you something you didn’t want to know, and you would’ve been happier if you’d never heard it?”

He blinks at her, and stares with visual direction while he still has pupils. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Vriska scoffs. “You’re something else, John.”

Despite everything, John cracks a joke. “Oh yeah? What am I?”

She can’t help but smile. “Flighty _and_ fighty.” She drives her shoe into the ground and kicks off, far less dramatic for her stilled movement; she’s missed the chance to leap from the swing’s hold. “Why did you tell me that story?”

John lifts his head at last, and frost has touched him and formed upon his bangs. “Because I was sad about it, but I was trying to pretend I wasn’t.”

Vriska shoves her hands into her pockets, and feels for dice that aren’t there. “You were?”

John passes through the intersection of the structure to stand beside her. “I figured if I could pretend I’m not sad about it, then I could stop thinking about it so much.”

“Huh.” Vriska evaluates him; his winter coat is as blue as her blood. “Well, hey. How about you show me around your neighborhood?”

He brightens, and hides his hands in his pockets, just like she has. “Yeah! That’d be great.”

**Author's Note:**

> to the spider I had to mercy kill this week: I'm so fucking sorry, you deserved better


End file.
